Hey there, a couple of doubts that other user may like to share answers to. I am imaging a 750Gb WD disk, with one very weak head. I used the option to only image discoverable partitions, to save time. (This is a great feature and has worked perfectly in the past). But this was a little weird, it DID find a partition, spanning about 90Gb in one continuous block at the start of the data. I have normally seen them all over the disk.

I am about 3 days into the imaging session, and the client tells me the disk in reality had one one partition, spanning the entire 750Gb! There was also no recent format, or re-install.

So: - under what conditions might Atola make a mistake in calculating used partitions?- how can I open up the sectors to scan to take in to account the whole disk, without re-staring and loosing the last 3 days of imaging?

I think Frank is correct about the 4K USB bridge. Can you provide the contents of sector 504 to confirm that it is an NTFS boot sector?

It would appear that Atola isn't able to handle this, yet. You will need to get a full clone of the drive and then connect the clone to the bridge or use R-Studio to interpret the 4k sectors. DDI with DRE or R-Studio over the network can target the data to be cloned.

I ran into a case recently where DDI was having an issue with an odd sector size, Yarek connected remotely to confirm that it wasn't just me and he supplied me with a fix the next day. Perhaps you can get a quick fix from Atola, as well.

- how can I open up the sectors to scan to take in to account the whole disk, without re-staring and loosing the last 3 days of imaging?

Assuming you are running v3.x software, you could simply create a new imaging session with all parameters set to defaults. It will copy only those sectors that weren't copied with any previous session(s).

If you are running an older release (v2.x), then you could stop the imaging process, and then change the parameters of the existing session to image all sectors (then hit Resume). Once again, Insight will never re-image what has already been imaged, unless you explicitly delete all imaging history.

This was standard laptop drive, no external enclosure, windows 7 pro. Looking at build date I would say the machine was on its original install. Doubt 4K sectors are factor.

Sector 504 is empty.

Any more ideas?

I agree that I should simply run the whole disk, but this has me wondering. Poking around past the last sector with data as informed by atola, I don't see much worth imaging........ BTW disk as a WD7500BPVT

Windows 7 defaults to sector 2048 as the boot sector of the first partition. Sector 63 is the default for Windows XP and earlier. Moreover, Windows 7 would have created an NTFS partition (type 07), whereas Atola is reporting "System ID: 6". I'm assuming "system ID" is Atola-speak for "partition ID", in which case type 06 would be a FAT partition.

If you could show us the MBR code and boot sector code, then that will tell us which OS was responsible for each sector.

As for the "NTFS boot sector at: 63", that appears to be a FAT boot sector. The sector count of 61448562 corresponds to about 31GB at 512 bytes per sector. That's about what you would expect if you tried to create a FAT32 partition in Windows XP and later.

Sector 2048 does appear to be a standard NTFS boot sector, but its size amounts to about 104MB (= 204799 x 512). That's the size of the reserved partition in a Windows 7 system. There must be a second NTFS boot sector at about the 104MB mark. You should also be able to locate its backup by reverse searching the drive.

In short, it does appear that the drive's owner is not telling you the truth.

If you are running an older release (v2.x), then you could stop the imaging process, and then change the parameters of the existing session to image all sectors (then hit Resume). Once again, Insight will never re-image what has already been imaged, unless you explicitly delete all imaging history.

Dmitry, in 2.2.x the only way I can change the imaging range is by starting a new imaging session. I would guess this ignores the copied block list from the previous session?

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